MOUNT JOY, PA — The eighteen-foot inflatable Frankenstein staked into the front yard of Dale Frommer on Cedar Street has, as of Sunday afternoon, retained legal counsel, marking the first known time this borough’s Halloween code has produced a billable hour.
The dispute began September 24, when the Sherwood Hills HOA issued Frommer a written warning citing the lawn ornament’s “scale, anchoring, and general posture.” The figure sways noticeably in any wind above six miles per hour, and at night casts a shadow that reaches the cul-de-sac.
Frommer, a regional sales manager for an industrial valve company, declined to remove it, and on October 2 retained Lancaster attorney Beth Crannage, who specializes in zoning, easements, and what she described over the phone as “everything people pretend they don’t care about until October.”
“The covenant says ‘seasonal decorations of reasonable size,'” Crannage said. “It does not define reasonable. My client’s position is that Frankenstein, being himself a creature of unreasonable proportions, is being singled out for what he is, not what he does.”
HOA president Doreen Rauschenberg, reached at her kitchen table, said the issue is not Frankenstein per se but “the precedent.” Last October, she noted, a neighbor two doors down inflated a witch that “made a noise like a dishwasher” from dusk until 11 p.m., and the board “let it slide and we are still hearing about it.”
A walk down Cedar Street on Tuesday evening confirmed that Frankenstein, illuminated from below by a generator-fed shop light, can be seen from the parking lot of the Turkey Hill on Route 230. Several drivers slowed. One pulled in and took a picture.
Frommer’s neighbor directly to the south, Carl Vetri, said he had no strong feelings about the figure itself but would like the generator turned off after ten. “It’s not the monster,” Vetri said. “It’s the hum.”
Frommer told this reporter he has no plans to deflate. He has, however, ordered a second unit — a fourteen-foot Grim Reaper — that he says will arrive Friday and be staked “well within the setback.”
Crannage, asked whether the Reaper complicates her case, paused for a long moment. “It does not simplify it,” she said.